Irma Vep is ostensibly about the making of a new version of Louis Feuillade's classic silent serial Les vampires (1915-16), the story of a criminal gang whose chief operative is Irma Vep (an anagram for "vampire"), a cabaret singer and expert at disguise, theft and murderer. Once-prominent director René Vidal (Jean-Pierre Léaud) has hired Hong Kong action star Maggie Cheung (playing a version of herself) for the female lead despite complaints from co-workers that the role is quintessentially French. Cheung arrives for work three days late, having been committed to a Chinese film that ran over schedule, to find a company in chaos as they attempt to keep up with Vidal's demands. Not knowing any French, she can only communicate with those production members who, like her, have a basic knowledge of English. As production staggers along, Cheung finds herself romantically pursued by Vidal and Zoé (Nathalie Richard), the film's costume designer. She also gets caught up in Vidal's rapidly declining sanity, making her experience of the film even more disjointed.
Critics have described Irma Vep as a critique of the decline of France's film industry as the personal films of the New Wave were supplanted by more commercial pictures like Luc Besson's La Femme Nikita (1990). With Léaud, who played François Truffaut's surrogate in such classic New Wave films as The 400 Blows (1959) and Stolen Kisses (1968), now cast as director, his character seems to be a dying remnant of that era (some have suggested the character was modeled on Jean-Luc Godard).
The film goes deeper, however, in dealing with the commodification of the individual. Cheung has agreed to star in one of Vidal's films in order to escape the commercialism of Hong Kong cinema. She and Zoé bond over their disdain for American films, which they consider over-produced. But Cheung's experience in France is all about people trying to commodify her. Vidal tries to shape her into the automaton he needs to capture his view of cinema. One of Zoé's friends (Bulle Ogier) tries to convince her to hook up with the costumer. When Vidal doesn't show up on set, an actor in the film asks Cheung to rehearse their scene together and tries to get her to play the scene his way. And an interviewer wants her to talk about filmmakers like John Woo, with whom she's never worked, just because he likes the director's work. Cheung doesn't appear in the final scenes, after the production has fallen apart. She's only discussed in terms of her flight plans, the airline tickets they're providing to get rid of her. Even that relates to her commodification as an actress, as she's chosen to return to Hong Kong via New York, where she has a meeting with commercially successful director Ridley Scott, and then onto Los Angeles, where's she's meeting with her agent.
Cheung has one moment of agency, however, when she dons her character's black cat suit and skulks around her hotel, eventually stealing another guest's jewelry. Her movements parallel the scene she had filmed for Vidal, but with a freedom she couldn't express under his direction.
Although Maggie Cheung, the character in Irma Vep, is treated as just an action star, in reality, by the time she made this film she had transitioned from action films like Jackie Chan's Police Story (1985) and Police Story 2 (1988) into more serious dramatic roles. She won Best Actress at the Berlin and Chicago Film Festivals for Center Stage (1991), the biography of 1930s Chinese actress Ruan Ling-yu and co-starred in Ho Yim's historical romance Red Dust (1990). Reflecting her character's values, she turned down more commercial roles in X2: X-Men United (2003), because she said it would feel like cheating on her values. Instead, she reunited with Assayas (whom she had previously been married to from 1998 to 2001) for Clean (2004), winning Best Actress at Cannes for her performance in a role loosely inspired by Courtney Love and Yoko Ono.
Assayas is the son of French filmmaker Jacques Rémy (real name Raymond Assayas). When his father was too ill to work, Assayas and his brother wrote scripts under his name for the French TV series Les enquêtes du commissaire Maigret in the early 1980s. He also worked as a film critic for Cahiers du cinéma, where he was one of the first to give serious consideration to the Chinese cinema of the 1980s. Assayas broke into features as writer and director of Disorder (1986), about the rise of a musical group that gets it start by robbing a music store. His sixth feature as director, Irma Vep, would be his biggest success at that time, placing among the 10 best as voted on by the Online Film Critics Society and winning the KNF Award at the Rotterdam International Film Festival.
The idea for Irma Vep came from Assayas' meetings with French director Claire Denis and Canadian director Atom Egoyan where they discussed making an experimental picture about a foreigner in Paris. Although Assayas made the film alone, he cast Egoyan's wife, Arsinée Khanjian, as the American hotel guest Cheung robs.
Harkening back to the New Wave, Assayas shot Irma Vep on the fly, completing the picture in just three weeks. Cinematographer Eric Gautier worked mostly with a handheld camera, weaving among the various figures on the film set or at a party to capture snippets of dialogue. This creates an improvisation feel similar to the work of one of the fathers of French cinema, Jean Renoir, who created a similar effect in his classic The Rules of the Game (1939). The hand-held camera, however, along with the inclusion of footage from other films -- Les Vampires, Cheung's The Heroic Trio (1993) and Chris Marker's experimental documentary Class de lutte (1969) -- gives Irma Vep a much more contemporary feel.
Director, Screenwriter: Olivier Assayas
Producer: George Benayoun
Cinematography: Eric Gautier
Score: Philippe Richard
Cast: Maggie Cheung (Maggie Cheung), Jean-Pierre Léaud (Rene Vidal), Nathalie Richard (Zoé), Antoine Basler (Journalist), Nathalie Bouetefeu (Laure), Alex Dascas (Desormeaux), Arsinée Khanjian (L'américaine), Bulle Ogier (Mireille), Lou Castel (José Mirano)
By Frank Miller
